Conery: Different team, same Cal

On the Cinderella side lies Virginia Commonwealth. VCU, this city school from Richmond, fourth place in its own unheralded conference, and now the incinerator of a million brackets, is no joke. They're a play-in team that just rolled Kansas by 10 points. VCU faces Butler, another little team that almost beat Duke in last year's final.

The marquee game is Kentucky-UConn, or John Calipari versus Jim Calhoun.

This is the third team Calipari has taken to the Final Four. The first time he did it, at UMass, I had a front-row seat.

Calipari spent years overachieving in Amherst. From playing home games in the iconic Cage fieldhouse to sellouts in the glittering Mullins Center, Coach Cal rose from chasing birds off the court before practice to knocking out heavyweights in Madison Square Garden. His Refuse to Lose ethos became gospel when he snatched game-changing center Marcus Camby from the backyard of mighty UConn.

Amherst went crazy. Reasonable people camped on sidewalks for tickets just to see these guys, the consensus No. 1 team in America. Even their pickup games drew crowds, and privileged it was to be the Boyden Gym rat plucked from the sideline to run full court with them, suddenly filling out a pickup roster with people most frequently seen on television.

Dan Shaughnessy started calling us UMass-Hooterville in The Boston Globe. Dick Vitale was screaming our name on ESPN.

UMass went to the Final Four and lost to a Kentucky team that would send nine players to the NBA, plus a certain UMass grad turned Celtics coach named Pitino.

Perhaps the first sign of trouble was when it became clear that Calipari, um, borrowed the Refuse to Lose slogan from the UMass football team, then trademarked it for profit. A prince on a crumbling campus, he was compensated to the tune of about $600,000 a year.

He rubbed some people the wrong way. Indeed, a rival coach once tried to physically attack him during a press conference.

Then there is the troubling case of Camby. Why did a lifelong UConn Huskies fan from Hartford suddenly bolt 50 miles north to Massachusetts? Word around The Pub was that there were about 30,000 good reasons stuffed in an envelope.

Camby later admitted to taking jewelry through shady agents. UMass tripped some giants, but their Final Four was officially vacated. It never happened.

Calipari and Camby both left early for the guaranteed millions of the NBA. C'mon, who do you know who wouldn't take that particular deal?

After his New Jersey Nets teams went a combined 72-112 – on balance, the Nets essentially paid him $15 million to lose all three of the playoff games he squeaked into – Coach Cal got fired, then took his act to back to college at Memphis.

There, he again guided an overachieving bunch to the summit, but then Memphis had its Final Four vacated in the same way UMass had.

At Memphis it wasn't jewelry, just the matter of the star player having accidentally taken the SATs by temporarily switching bodies with a much smarter guy, an act NCAA investigators took a decidedly skeptical view of.

My pal Cal was now 0-for-2.

But, continually failing up in a way rarely seen outside Wall Street, he was then hired by Kentucky, only the best job in college basketball.

Self-evidently, Calipari can coach. He can recruit with anyone and is a master motivator who gets every shred of effort from every player on his club.

Now he faces Jim Calhoun, he of the Big East pedigree and the two national titles and the, until recently, sterling reputation out of Storrs, Conn. Seems UConn is no stranger to recruiting violations, either.

These men are ideological and stylistic rivals with no love lost.

Memorable was Calhoun being interviewed after Calipari took the NBA job. The assembled press repeatedly tried to goad Calhoun into bad-mouthing Calipari, but the big Irishman wouldn't take the bait, pointedly, almost angrily answering every variant of the question with, “I'm sure he'll do a great job in the pros.”

So now they play in the Athens-Sparta semifinal on Saturday. And one of them is going to win, and play for a national championship on Monday night.

It's fun when you're in college and your team goes to the Final Four, it really is. Packed dorm rooms and off-campus apartments explode with revelry.

It's beery and jocular and the weather is getting nice.

Later you find that your program essentially got burned for the insurance dough while some wiseguy in a nice suit made a clean getaway. And went looking for the next dupe.

It's big-time college basketball. It's March. And it really is madness.

Contributing writer Rob Conery can be contacted at robconery@yahoo.com.